Anonymous has Fox News in its crosshairs

The hacktivist group Anonymous has issued a call to take down Fox News’ website, in response to the network’s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protestors. The rallying cry for “Operation Fox Hunt” points to November 5 as the day of the cyber-attack.

The call comes in the form of a video posted to the organization’s YouTube account. The script of the video, spoken as always by TTS (text-to-speech) software, cites vocabulary that was supposedly used by Fox News on-air personalities to describe the protestors, including “filthy, disgusting, and dirty.” They ask “those who are able” to bring down the website of the popular Rupert Murdoch-owned cable channel.

Not stopping at wanting to bring the Fox News website to a halt, the message also asks followers to engage the network in a propaganda campaign of their own, in order to “show them how it feels to be chastised.” What exactly that means is unknown, but perhaps the creators of this message are encouraging creativity on the part of its members.

Anonymous were some of the first initiators of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, which have been ongoing for over a month. No longer centered solely around Wall Street, protests have taken place in over 70 major US cities, as well as smaller communities and international locales. Their demonstrations generally center around the topics of economic inequality, corporate greed, and wealthy businesses’ influence over the government.

Whatever your take is on Fox News, it’s hard to argue that their primary intended audience isn’t the right-wing-leaning members of the US population. From that perspective, it isn’t terribly surprising that their coverage of Occupy Wall Street would be presented in a less than appreciative light. It also isn’t shocking that Anonymous, who has been encouraging the protests from the get-go, would use that coverage as justification for an attack on Fox News’ website.